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What is it with Infortrend? We can't carry on placing it as a minor league player when it adds auto-tiering just weeks after adding SSD support.

Infortrend is a Taiwan-based disk array supplier to small and medium businesses, and one of its main products is the ESVA, Enterprise Scalable Virtual Array, a Fibre Channel or iSSI-connected enclosure featuring storage virtualisation, thin provisioning, distributed load balancing, array-based snapshots and replication.

Infortrend has concentrated on adding enterprise features and value for money. It recently added STEC Mach16 solid state drive (SSD) support to the ESVA and other product lines. Now it's added automated tiering to the ESVA line, and it moves data automatically between SSD and disk drive tiers.

Data is categorised in sub-LUN chunks and its movement between tiers us based on usage patterns and user-set policies. A single RAID ESVA configuration with automated storage tiering across eight 100GB SSDs and eight 2TB nearline disk drives can offer a performance increase of up to 150 per cent compared to a traditional ESVA configuration consisting of one RAID array and one expansion enclosure, at the same storage capacity and cost but without the automated tiering.

You can optimise for both performance and cost reduction by replacing a single RAID volume ESVA array with 600GB SAS disk drives in the main enclosure and an expansion box, by replacing it with four of the SSDs and a dozen 2TB disk drives. That gets you an up to 50 per cent performance boost, 5TB of extra capacity, and a more than 15 per cent cost reduction.

Infortrend is staying with ESVA and automated tiering – and EMC, Dell, HPDS, HP, etc are doing the same – but it is offering this feature at lower prices than the top-end suppliers and thus enabling its end users to enjoy the same storage efficiencies as customers of EMC, NetApp, IBM and the other top table players.

Automated storage tiering is now available on the following Infortrend models: ESVA F70-2830, ESVA F60-2830, ESVA E60-2230, and ESVA E60-2130. ®